France on the way to same-sex marriage

The French Senate on Friday approved legislation that would allow same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, sending it to the National Assembly, where quick approval is expected. Both France and Great Britain are in the final stages of approving marriage equality.

Same-sex marriage is “an act of freedom, it is an act of equality, it is an act of brotherhood,” France’s justice minister, Christiane Faubira, said after the Senate vote. “Marriage becomes a universal institution.”

Opponents of same-sex marriage demonstrate outside the French Senate. The Senate approved marriage equality, which is certain to pass the National Assembly.

Legalizing gay marriage was a promise made by French President Francois Hollande in his campaign last year. The president’s Socialist Party holds a comfortable majority in the National Assembly.

Still, the issue has stirred emotion in the Republic. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched through Paris streets, in demonstrations opposing same-sex marriage and rival marches denouncing homophobia. Opponents have called for another mass demonstration on May 26.

“You’re disrupting the civil code: Traditional family is the main pillar of society,” argued Jean-Claude Lenoir, a lawmaker from the opposition UPM movement. The Senate’s vote to pass the legislation was 179 to 157.

The traditional family has been a shaky pillar of late, as seen in lives of the French elite. Hollande never married the fellow Socialist politician whom he sired four children, and has taken up with a French journalist who has left her husband. The president he unseated, Nicholas Sarkozy, was a three-time bridegroom. The late President Francois Mitterand had two families, a wife and two adult sons as well as a mistress and daughter with whom he privately lived away from the Elysee Palace.

Dying of cancer, Mitterand spent his last Christmas with wife and sons, and then went to Egypt for New Years with mistress and daughter. The two families marched, one after another, into church for his memorial service.